ARTICLES ABOUT RADIOACTIVE WASTE BY DATE - PAGE 4

Very late on Tuesday night at Joe Allen's restaurant in Midtown, the actor-playwright Austin Pendleton started worrying aloud about a close friend. "Doing what Joanna is doing again in this city," he said, running his hand through his shaggy mop of hair, "is like casting your flowers into a field of radioactive waste." The absent object of the Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble member's concern was Joanna McClelland Glass, a long-established, Naperville-based playwright who has been burned in New York before.

Russia has shut down a notorious, aging nuclear plant responsible for decades of environmental ruin in the Ural Mountains, a decision heralded Monday as an unexpected shift in how Moscow views dangers posed by nuclear waste. Since the 1950s, the plant in Mayak, in central Russia, had been dumping radioactive waste into a nearby lake, contaminating drinking water for thousands of people. More than 40,000 Russians living in the villages and hamlets surrounding Mayak have been treated for the effects of radiation exposure in the last 10 years.

President Bush formally approved Nevada's Yucca Mountain as the nation's high-level nuclear waste repository Tuesday, ending a 20-year political fight and shifting the battle to the courts. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer called Bush's signature on Yucca Mountain legislation "an important step forward on the way to a comprehensive policy for dealing with our nation's nuclear waste." Nevada officials, who bitterly fought the repository 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, charging it would be unsafe, pledged to block it through lawsuits.

After 20 years of debate and some $7 billion in scientific study, the U.S. Senate finally took the decisive step Tuesday to approve Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the nation's storage site for nuclear waste. This is one of the most excruciatingly analyzed and debated decisions in the country's history. It's also the right decision, especially for Illinois, which has the most nuclear plants of any state and, as a result, the most radioactive waste. The vote to override Nevada's objections was supported by Sen. Peter Fitzgerald and by Sen. Dick Durbin, whose late and welcome change of heart on the issue provided some necessary momentum.

Despite an early-morning earthquake that rumbled nearby, federal officials insisted Friday that the site of a proposed national nuclear waste repository in the Nevada desert is safe. No damage or injuries were reported after the magnitude 4.4 temblor struck at 5:40 a.m. The earthquake was centered about 12 miles southeast of the Yucca Mountain site, according to the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colo. The earthquake went unnoticed on the Las Vegas Strip but was felt in Pahrump, 40 miles southeast.

With the Senate poised to vote on whether to allow the transcontinental shipping of nuclear waste for storage in Yucca Mountain, a public interest research group has created a Web site that allows citizens to find out how close their home, work or children's school is to the path of that radioactive waste. In Illinois, for example, 1,063 schools will be within 1 mile of rail, barge and highway routes proposed by the Department of Energy. Chicago's Wrigley Field is 5.7 miles from the nearest path.

After a decade of negotiations, radioactive thorium will be removed from the DuPage River and a tributary in the West Chicago area under an agreement with Oklahoma-based Kerr-McGee Corp., a lawyer for DuPage County said Monday. The agreement, which must be put in a written plan, says thorium deposits in Kress Creek and the west branch of the DuPage River will be excavated and shipped to a licensed site in Utah, said Joseph Karaganis, the lawyer working on behalf of the county, West Chicago and others.

The Tribune is right ("Quit dawdling on nuclear waste," Editorial, Jan. 18) that a centralized storage site for radioactive waste from nuclear power plants would be safer and easier to protect from terrorists. It's about time the Tribune acknowledged the gravity of the terrorist threat posed by atomic power plants. Unfortunately, Yucca Mountain in Nevada--where the nuclear industry wants to put the stuff--is neither safe nor secure, and no amount of wishing will make it so. In 1997, U.S. Department of Energy scientists reported that rainwater had seeped from the top of the mountain into the supposedly permanently dry interior--in just 40 years!